G.E. Andrews writes, "Leibniz was apparently the first person to ask about partitions. In a 1674 letter he asked J. Bernoulli about the number of “divulsions” of integers. In modern terminology, he was asking the first question about the number of partitions of integers. He observed that there are three partitions of 3 (3, 2 + 1, and 1 + 1 + 1) as well as five of 4 (4, 3 + 1, 2 + 2, 2 + 1 + 1 and 1 + 1 + 1 + 1)."
I find this assertion of priority incredibly difficult to believe as well as the following:
Peter Luschny, an editor for the OEIS commenting on simply an allusion to a listing of integer partitions, certainly not an attribution as to the first publication with that order, "I strongly appeal against the terms A&S-order or A-St-order. Whoever (...?) introduced these terms into the OEIS made a disservice. It is well known that this widely used order was introduced by C. F. Hindenburg in his 1779 dissertation and the proper way to reference it is either 'Hindenburg order' or a mathematical description in general terms. Neither Abramowitz nor Stegun have ever written a single line about monomial orders, not even in their Handbook. A detailed analysis of the Hindenburg way to enumerate the partitions can be found Knuth's chapter 7 in TAOCP 4. The term A&S does not appear a single time in this work. Let us base our terminology on serious literature rather than introduce private jargon into OEIS."
I would assume that the ancient Babylonians and Chinese had addresssed the topic long before either of these two mathematicians (in diverse, reasonable, and exhaustive orderings), and that this OCD necessitating attributing priority to particular, long-deceased individuals is both gratuitous and naive.
Accordingly, to support a definitive rebuttal of these somewhat trivial assertions and much more importantly to discourage such scholasticism in general, can anyone provide references on earlier investigations of the integer partitions?
(Some indication of interests of the ancients in integer partitions: The oldest known magic square dates to 2200 BCE (Cf: A brief survey of combinatorics).
